Faunal collecting in Southeast Asia

Abstract

In the mid-1980’s, while lecturing at a small university in Sabah, I accompanied my honours student to the Danum Valley Field Centre for fieldwork, an inventory of small mammals near the Danum station. The university was training students in field biology, while acquiring mammal specimens for the university’s small museum, sponsored by Danum Valley Management Committee. The station had been open less than a year, with only a few researchers working on site. One evening after dinner’1 was approached by a European visitor to the station, who inquired about our work. When I replied that we were collecting small mammals as part of a fauna inventory, he gazed at me with great concern and remarked, “Don’t you think what you are doing is contradictory to the status of Danum as a conservation area?” Although our subsequent discussion was brief, both of us quickly realised our points of view were rather different. The experience has remained with me ever since. I have worked in Malaysia for the past 25 years lecturing in animal taxonomy and ecology, and conducting field studies of frogs, snakes, crocodiles, birds and small mammals. Since the early 1970s there have been some dramatic educational, demographic and environmental changes in the country, as the development of plantation crops progressively expanded, and formerly extensive forests rapidly receded. Agricultural, agrohorestry or aquaculture schemes became popular alternatives to the management of original habitats. In tertiary education, taxonomy and ecology gradually took aback seat, as it had in temperate countries, to applied sciences and biotechnology. Rather abruptly in the 1990s, the subject of threatened biodiversity entered the stage, with its emphasis of documenting species of the tropics, where diversity is greatest. A great urgency was felt to sample this largely unknown resource before pristine habitats disappeared. Funds have become available, but efforts to document Malaysia’s biodiversity have, unfortunately, not kept pace with rapid agricultural and industrial growth, which has progressively altered the landscape.. In fact, collections of terrestrial vertebrate specimens has declined almost to zero. This paper attempts to explain how collections have run aground, and with luck, how they can be put back on track.